Can Menopause Be Reversed? Should It Be? Greek Doctors Claim To Have Done It In Woman Wanting A Baby

A woman who experienced premature menopause at age 40 reportedly had her first period in five years after Greek doctors injected her ovaries with a controversial treatment used to speed the repair of muscle and other injured soft tissue in athletes, according to a story posted Wednesday by NewScientist, a British science magazine.

The treatment, called platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, involves extracting blood from a patient and spinning it in a centrifuge to concentrate the platelets in the plasma, the fluid part of blood. The fluid is then injected back into the patient (here's a somewhat technical instructional video by the U.S. company that made the PRP kit used to treat the woman). You might have heard of PRP, made famous for treating soft tissue injuries in superstar athletes such as golfer Tiger Woods.

Dr. Konstantinos Sfakianoudis, a gynecologist at the Genesis Athens Hospital's Center for Human Reproduction, told New Scientist that the woman's periods resumed six months after receiving the PRP treatment. Sfakianoudis said his team has been able to collect three eggs from the woman, two of which have been fertilized with her husband's sperm and frozen. According to the article, doctors are waiting to transfer the embryos to the woman's uterus until they can fertilize a third egg to go along with them.

Greek doctors claim they've enabled perimenopausal and postmenopausal women to start ovulating again so they could use in vitro fertilization in the hope of becoming pregnant. (Shutterstock photo)

"It offers a window of hope that menopausal women will be able to get pregnant using their own genetic material" instead of donor eggs, Sfakianoudis told the magazine. He said he has treated the ovaries of around 30 menopausal women age 46 to 49 with PRP and was able to retrieve and fertilize eggs from most of them. (Probably because scientists usually don't report their results in the lay press first, New Scientist referred to Sfakianoudis's news about rejuvenating ovaries as a "claim.")

"It is potentially quite exciting," Roger Sturmey, an embryologist at Hull York Medical School in the United Kingdom, told New Scientist, calling Sfakianoudis's claim of reversing menopause "biologically plausible." "But it also opens up ethical questions over what the upper age limit of mothers should be."

Of course, people have actually been asking those questions for years, ever since the use of donor eggs pretty much eliminated the upper age limit for a woman getting pregnant.

For example, a story last year in the Jerusalem Post about an Israeli woman who delivered her first baby at age 65--11 years above the legal age limit for in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Israel--sparked hundreds of comments from readers. "Once again, man is playing God," one reader said. "Now they can both wear diapers," another said.

Sfakianoudis does not appear to be treating women that far past menopause, though, and it seems unlikely his approach would enable women that old to resume ovulating. At the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Helsinki this month, Sfakianoudis's team presented a poster with results from treating eight women, all in their 40s. They were described as "perimenopausal," having had their last menstrual period just several months earlier (on average, women who go through menopause naturally have their last period around age 50).

The doctors injected the eight women's ovaries with PRP. In their abstract, which appears to represent their only published results outside the New Scientist article, they note that "PRP constitutes a concentrated source of growth factors and cytokines," molecules that play a role in cell-to-cell communication, spurring cells to travel to sites of injury.

The scientists noted in their abstract that PRP has been shown to improve the blood supply and quality of ovarian tissue reimplanted in a woman who'd had it frozen because a medical condition necessitated surgery to remove her ovaries. When administered into the uterus, the scientists said, PRP also has been shown to promote the growth of its lining, called the endometrium, making it more receptive to an embryo. (Sfakianoudis told New Scientist that he has injected PRP into the uteruses of six women who'd had multiple miscarriages and failed IVF. After the treatment, three of the women became pregnant with IVF and are all now in their second trimester, Sfakianoudis told the magazine.)

One to three months after treatment, the women's menstrual cycles resumed, which the scientists described as "ovarian rejuvenation" in their abstract. All of the women underwent "natural cycle" IVF, which does not involve ovary-stimulating drugs, the abstract said, but none of the resulting embryos had yet been transferred to their wombs.

I wonder whether these women's periods might have resumed without PRP treatment, considering that hormone levels fluctuate and periods become irregular around the time of menopause, which is the meaning of "perimenopause." It's not like there was a comparison group of perimenopausal women who did not get PRP.

But Sfakianoudis and his collaborators speculate that PRP acts as a kind of fountain of youth for aging ovaries. "We could assume that PRP infusion probably enriched the dysfunctional, perimenopausal ovarian tissue with the essential factors for angiogenesis (development of new blood vessels) and normal vascular function leading to tissue regeneration," the researchers wrote.

You might be wondering how the study participants still happened to have eggs in their ovaries, given that women are thought to be born with all their eggs, which decline in number as they get older. "Many perimenopausal women may maintain a restricted amount of inactive primordial follicles that could be activated by the PRP growth factors or the subsequent ovarian tissue regeneration," the scientists wrote.

PRP therapy may extend the fertility potential of perimenopausal women," Sfakianoudis and his team concluded. Still, they wrote, larger studies of both perimenopausal and postmenopausal women are needed to verify their findings.

Although a number of academic medical centers offer PRP to both weekend and professional athletes, whether it actually works isn't clear, raising questions about why the Greek patients' periods resumed. Insurance plans generally don't cover PRP to treat injuries because they consider it to be experimental. And a 2014 Cochrane Review concluded that "there is currently insufficient evidence to support the use of PRT (plasma-rich therapies) for treating musculoskeletal soft tissue injuries."

I’ve been a journalist ever since I edited my elementary school newspaper in Wheeling, W.Va. My father was an ob-gyn, which helps explain why I gravitated toward covering health and medicine, with a special interest in women’s health. As a freelance writer, I’ve written for...